


and these fingertips will never run through your skin

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Bisexual Characters, First Kiss, Genderqueer Character, Holography, Introspection, Morse Code, Other, Trans Character, an attempt at one anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29442771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Al’s not sure when he realizes he’s in love with Sam.It’s not before Sam decides to pull the stupidest, riskiest move in the entire history of stupid, risky moves by deciding he’s going to test Project Quantum Leap on himself. It couldn't have been before then, right? Right. He’s sure of it.Mostly, anyway.
Relationships: Sam Beckett/Al Calavicci
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	and these fingertips will never run through your skin

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, maybe I just genuinely really like Quantum Leap and will continue writing for it. We'll see how it goes. Happy Valentine's Day. 
> 
> [ **CW:** this fic contains nongraphic blood/violence, brief and nongraphic references to death/injury including child death/injury (again, the kind of thing Sam would leap to stop), unintentional misgendering, brief mention of two underage kids fooling around, and the word "queer" used somewhat derogatorily.]

Al’s not sure when he realizes he’s in love with Sam.

* * *

“Hey,” Sam says, hands shaking, blood sticky on his skin and pooling in the lines of his palms, “am I—am I going to die?”

“No,” Al says firmly. “You’re not, and neither is Noah. Nobody’s dying while I’m around. Okay?”

“...Okay,” Sam whispers, aiming the gun at the opposite wall. Blood keeps trickling down. “Okay. I trust you, Al.”

* * *

It’s not before Sam decides to pull the stupidest, riskiest move in the entire history of stupid, risky moves by deciding he’s going to test Project Quantum Leap on himself. He’s pretty sure it’s not, anyway. He liked Sam then. They were friends. He was a genius, the smartest person Al had ever met, especially compared to him, beer-soaked and floundering. 

But he’d also been so… not really naïve. That wasn’t the best way to put it. But he was a child prodigy who hadn’t exactly grown up with a thriving friend group. He threw himself into his work with the kind of enthusiasm that typically came from a stunted ability to make friends with people his own age, if Al said so himself. The guy needed to learn to loosen up and have fun. So he taught him how, as much as Sam would let him. 

It just hadn’t been—well, they’d—

It wasn’t then. He’s sure of it. Mostly, anyway.

* * *

“You look nice,” Al comments.

Sam huffs, smoothing down his skirt. Velvet, eugh. “Sure I do.”

“No, I’m serious,” he insists. Two random partygoers walk right through him, briefly cutting off his line of sight to Sam. “You look nice. The blue really makes your eyes, uh, pop.”

Now Sam outright laughs. “C’mon, Al.”

“You do!” Why isn’t he listening? Al even _told him_ he was being serious, just so he knew for sure. Sam kind of always looks nice, honestly, but he’d get a big head if Al told him so all the time, and there really is something about this dress that makes him look better than usual. He just looks nice, why can’t he tell?

* * *

Al’s been attracted to men all his life, of course. He just never needed it to be anything more than a joke. There was Tom, when they were both fourteen, fumbling around for each other in the dark, and Gary, when they were both nineteen, sharing a cigarette. Those ones stand out the most because of their novelty. Generally the rest of the time it was just spit and laughing and rough hands. Two buddies fooling around on a whim because there was nothing better to do. 

But Sam’s different. Al’s not sure why at first. Maybe it feels more personal because Sam depends on him now. It kind of feels like that has to be it. He’s Sam’s one lifeline to their present. To _home._ He’s Sam’s only constant friend. The only one that’s always there for him no matter what happens. That’s just who he is now. He _has_ to be a fixed point for him. Magnetic poles don’t fall in love with Arctic Terns.

And that’s still true even when he takes notice of things and realizes that it’s not the _only_ reason why feeling attracted to Sam feels different from being attracted to other men.

* * *

Al punches a phrase into the handlink with a little more force than strictly necessary, fingernail rapping against the side with impatience when it takes a second to hum and falter. “You know, way back in 1858 someone came up with _thon_ as a—”

“Al, you’re not helping,” Sam sighs. He(?) rests his(?) chin on his(?) hands, arms folded over the table. “Is it really that important? It’s not like anybody is going to use them. They won’t even know I’m a… whatever it is I am. It doesn’t bother me that much.”

“Yes, it does,” Al says flatly. “I’ve seen you. We’ll find something you like. Open that book up again and show me the margin notes. There’s something for you in there.”

* * *

Sometimes Al imagines what it’ll be like when Sam finally comes home. (Most of the time it’s a struggle to convince himself Sam _will_ ever make it home.)

It’s almost frightening. To see the other people wind up behind Sam’s eyes. Almost nobody who loves the people Sam leaps into seem to notice the difference, and Al doesn’t understand how that could possibly be. Because it’s so _obvious_ to him. They don’t move like Sam does, or make expressions like hir, or anything like that. They just _aren’t Sam._

So when Al sees them, blinking in the imaging chamber, sometimes it makes him imagine what it’ll be like when Sam’s in hir own body again. How he’ll feel hir own face and hands and pull at hir clothes before turning to him and smiling so wide hir cheeks hurt and Al will hug hir and—

And that’s where it ends. Okay? That’s where it ends. Get off his case. 

* * *

“You could have been free,” Sam says, hands shaking, hir eyes wide, eyes still glassy with tears. He knows the story, he knows the pain, he knows the person it made him lose. He saw how much it hurt Beth that he was gone and he saw how much it _still_ hurt Al that he was away from her. He opens hir mouth to say something else but it dies in hir throat. 

Al doesn’t know how to make him understand. He taps the handlink, dots and dashes. Tap, tap. Pause. Tap, dash. Dash, dash. Pause. Tap, tap, dash, tap. Tap, dash, Tap. Tap. Tap. He tries and fails to come up with a way to actually say it. To tell Sam how much it hurt to see hir desperation to save hir family. Hir brother. Just one person he loved. One person, that’s all. He deserves that much, Al thinks. His own past seems like it's set in stone. As much as he misses Beth, as much as she was the only one he ever really saw himself loving until the day he died, he knows he can’t… he can’t change it. There’s nothing he can do. And he doesn’t think he deserves it much, anyway. Not like Sam does. 

Sam’s always been better than him. He lost someone he loved. Two someones. Three of them, really, if Katie counted as gone after marrying that man, but at least two. And maybe he couldn't do anything to save hir father, but he could save hir brother, and he deserves that, because he lost two people and he still came out of it the best person Al knows. Losing Beth only turned Al into a hollowed-out waste of space.

What he says instead is, “I was always free.”

It’s too long to explain it, anyhow.

* * *

It’s not where it ends, but Al refuses to admit that to himself.

* * *

Al frowns a little, trying to build up his courage. He taps the handlink to give himself something to do. “Sam?” 

“Yeah?” Sam asks, winded, hands braced on hir knees as he heaves for breath. Alicia and Jennifer, the two younger sisters of Bill, the real owner of the body he’s in now, shout for hir to keep going, cheeks rosy as they sit like little princesses in their shared sled. Sam’s flushed too, breath coming in short visible puffs of silver. 

“...Never mind. Have fun with your kids.” Al forces himself to grin and steps back and lets the door close just as Sam throws a snowball right where he would’ve been standing.

* * *

Alright, _fine._

Maybe sometimes Al lets himself think about other things about Sam. Like how soft hir hands are—were? He only took them a few times, whenever he had the chance to—after years of no longer being a farm boy. Or about hugging hir for real without his hands passing right through hir. Maybe tugging hir down so he could kiss hir cheek or something.

But _that’s all._

* * *

“You’re gonna crash the car,” Al says, sing-song, pretending to fold his arms behind his head. He traces his index finger over the front without even really thinking about it as the car goes over potholes and throws Sam this way and that. 

“I’m not gonna crash Jason’s car,” Sam says through gritted teeth. Al enjoys the tanktop he’s wearing. Very sequin-y. If that’s a real adjective people use in 1973. It might not be. He’s pretty sure it isn’t. He’s also enjoying it for other normal reasons not related to how Sam’s arms look. Or the insanely short shorts Alexei decided to wear that morning. “Because he’ll kill me, and I don’t want to die on the stupidest leap of all time.”

* * *

It’s not weird to sometimes catch yourself maybe, kind of, just slightly fantasizing about having sex with your best friend, is it?

* * *

“Al, how far is the nearest—”

“Eleven and third miles,” Al says, solemnly. “She’s not going to make it that far on foot, and the snow is too thick for the truck.”

Sam shakes hir head. “No, no, no, Amy, take deep breaths, okay? Focus on breathing. I know this is scary. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re going to be okay, I’m going to get you through this, alright? I’m here. Al, I’m going to get her epipen, you just—you stay here and talk to her, okay? She can’t—I won’t let her die.”

“I know you won’t,” he says. It’s true. Sam’s here to save Amy from the anaphylaxis that’ll take her life. And he _knows_ he’ll succeed. He always does. 

* * *

Sam has to know. Al’s pretty sure he has to know. But he’s grateful that he doesn’t say anything to him about it. He keeps quiet and goes about hir new normal day-to-day and all that entails as if he hasn’t picked up on it yet. Business as usual. As if this is normal for everybody and not just for them, two of the unluckiest people on planet Earth (and one of the smartest).

Sam _has_ to know, though. Because he _is_ so smart. The smartest and bravest person Al’s ever known, more so than any of the other people he’s ever come across. Soldiers, firefighters, women who danced at strip clubs for a living—Sam’s braver than all of them combined, and smarter than a room of a dozen doctors and scientists. Al’s certain of it. 

So he has to know. If Al were in hir shoes (though hopefully not _like that_ ever again), he would know. Wouldn’t he? He’d be able to pick up on all the little signs that Al tries to keep tamped down but knows he constantly fails at. He’d hear every missed word and dropped sentence and string them together to figure out what it is he’s really trying to say. And he’d probably still choose to ignore it just like Sam must be doing, because it’ll only make things awkward, or ruin them when he’s supposed to be the one person Sam can count on, or…

Regardless of all of it, Sam has to know.

Doesn’t he?

* * *

“Hey, Sam?” Al absently taps a staccato burst on the side of the handlink. 

“Hm?” Sam looks up from Christine’s book about human anatomy. Slightly later edition than the one he studied from, apparently. Of _course_ he’d be fascinated by that, enough that it’s no trouble to keep Christine and her teenage son inside to pore over their textbooks, away from the boat accident that’ll leave one of them dead and the other in a coma. 

Al lets the tapping fill the silence while he tries to work out what he’s _actually_ going to say to hir, interspersing a secondary pause where he traces his finger to the side. Tap, dash, tap, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, tap, dash. Tap. “You ever, uh,” he coughs into his fist. “Uh. You know. Swung for a guy before?”

“...No,” Sam says, and fidgets with Chrstine’s locket and the little pearl ring that sits on the chain along with it, beside the golden wedding band. He looks away and ducks hir head down into hir shoulders. Like he does when he’s lying. Or embarrassed. Either is a possibility with that kind of question. “Why?”

“Just curious,” Al says with a shrug. He speeds up his tapping, anxious. Dash, tap, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, dash. Okay. Leap of faith, or whatever the hell. “‘Cause, you know, I have.”

Sam briefly drops hir pen. It rolls off the table. It’s less about what Al actually said, because it was something of an open secret. It was an open joke that Al would flirt with… well… anyone and anything, basically. It never bothered the women Sam could remember seeing him with, not that he paid a whole lot of attention there. It was just something Al did. It’s less about what he actually said with his mouth and more about everything else.

“Okay,” he says gingerly after bending to pick up hir pen. “Like you said, I know.”

“And you’re sure you… haven’t?” Tap, dash, tap, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, tap, dash. Tap.

“I think I’d remember hooking up with a guy, Al.” Sam starts fidgeting. He bumps hir retrieved pen against the glass of water repeatedly, not quite in time with Al, with a different rotation. Tap, tap. Pause. Dash, tap, dash. Dash, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, dash, dash. “I’ve thought about guys like that, but everyone has. I just never did anything with it.”

“That still counts,” Al informs hir. Dash, tap, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, dash. “Even if you didn’t really do it, it counts.” He taps his foot, not in any particular rhythm this time, full of nervous energy.

Sam nods and goes back to paging through the textbook. He knows. Mostly. It just doesn’t feel like it counts, since he’s only ever thought about it. Hir classmates when he was in college, even though they were all older than hir. His neighbor when he was a kid. One of Tom’s friends who made him have very confusing dreams when he was thirteen. It was just a fact. Everybody had that kind of thing happen to them. It was just whether or not you acted on it that made you a queer or not.

(Though, Sam supposes, he kind of already is one. It’s not just guys and girls who like just other guys or girls now, or the scattered few like Al who liked both, it’s people like hir. For being _hir.)_

Al coughs again. “I’m not done.”

“Oh.” Sam looks up again. Christine’s son is in the other room pouting about being forced to study physics, neither of them are worried about him walking in and questioning why his mom is talking to empty air.

“I love you,” Al says.

And the door closes before Sam can do anything more than furrow hir eyebrows and open hir mouth.

* * *

He is _such_ an idiot.

* * *

They don’t bring it up. Any time Sam so much as looks at him when there’s a lull in whatever it is he’s trying to do (Al can’t focus on the instructions he passed off to hir, not after what he said last time, so he just crosses his fingers and hopes whatever he said makes sense), he ducks out of there as fast as he can.

It’s one thing to tell your friend you’ve played switch hitter for both sides of the fence that he, specifically, sits in the middle of, and it’s another to tell your friend that you love hir in the same breath. He knows Sam loves him too, in the friend way, and usually he’d be able to get away with telling hir that’s how he meant it, but not after… all of that. Because he’s an idiot and couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

At least they had the big revelation that Sam’s fantasized about guys. _(Other_ guys, maybe? Sam’s something else, he’s not a guy, that’s obvious, but maybe he’s enough of a guy to say that if he’s thought about guys in a queer way then it was an “other guys” thing. It’s not important, but it’s easier to think about than anything specifically relating to Al himself.)

He won’t _let_ Sam bring it up. Absolutely not. He’d rather die than address it again. He _won’t_ talk about it with hir.

“Hey—” Sam tries to start, leaning casually against the doorway of Lonnie’s barnhouse. 

Al’s gone before he can finish. 

* * *

If there was a prize for stupid ideas, Al’s pretty sure he’s a gold medal olympian. 

* * *

“Come on, stop running away—Al, I’m serious, get back here—” There’s no point in trying to chase a hologram, but Sam does hir best regardless, fingers closing on empty air where the projection of Al’s shoulder had been seconds before. 

Dammit.

* * *

He knows it’s not fair. He’s Sam’s safety net. He shouldn’t be avoiding hir just because of his own stupid hangups when that’s potentially putting Sam’s life and the safety of god knows how many people on the line. It’s his own fault he’s in this situation. It only happened because he was a colossal goddamn moron who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

This isn’t like losing Beth, where it… where it really wasn’t anyone’s fault but the people who took him captive in the first place. Anybody could think they were a bad soldier for getting caught by the enemy, sure, but once they started thinking that about their own brothers in arms, that was when things started to decay, so Al had tried to turn his thoughts around so he wouldn’t think badly of the people in hell with him. Beth had thought he was dead. She’d tried waiting for him, but she’d really thought he was never coming back. It wasn’t her fault she’d found love again with some—some _lawyer._

Other marriages, sure, maybe those ones fell a little more on his shoulders, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe he’d been unattached from the start but they’d noticed that and acted the exact same way. Mutually assured destruction. Dynamite lit from both ends.

This, though? If Al ruins this for himself, that’s his own damn fault. Sam relies on him and he screwed that all up. 

He just needs to grow a spine and apologize.

Unfortunately, that’s never come easy to him. 

* * *

“You’re back,” Sam says, supporting hirself on the fencepost he’s supposed to be hammering in. A wide sunhat sits on top of hir head and he’s wearing a pair of dirty green and grey gardening gloves along with hir overalls. Well, along with Mason’s overalls, but same difference.

“I’m back.” Al pretends to kick the fencepost. “Uh, so, how’s it looking?”

“Pretty good,” he says. “I got it all set up so the neighbors can call the hospital when Amelia’s water breaks tonight, and I made sure the midwife has a map that’ll get her around the blocked roads. Got all the heating stuff set up, too.”

“That’s great, Sam.” Al taps the handlink. It beeps at him in protest. Just what they need, more computers with attitude. “Look, I just wanted to say that I’m—”

“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Sam interrupts, shaking hir head, “but you keep running away. I…” He sighs and taps the fence. The wood muffles it, but Al can see the pattern. 

Tap, dash, tap, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, tap, dash. Tap.

Pause.

Dash, tap, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, dash. 

Pause.

Dash. Dash, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash.

“Okay?” Sam says.

“...Oh.” Al looks at Sam’s hand on the post so he doesn’t have to look at the rest of hir. “I didn’t know you…”

Sam shrugs. “I’ve picked a lot of things up.”

“I knew you knew _how_ to do it, I just didn’t think you were paying attention to it when I did it, that’s all,” Al says. Way to go with that nervous habit. Of course Sam was the one person who would _ever_ pick up on that.

Sam frowns a little. “I always pay attention to you.”

“Oh,” Al says again. Quieter this time.

The distant drone of Montana’s cicadas sounds almost overwhelming beneath the pale gold afternoon sun. It’s not a pretty sound, exactly. More like a sawtooth running endlessly through air than a proper serenade.

Still, it’s not the worst backing track nature could’ve chosen for an earnest attempt at a first kiss between a real, solid human being and a man who can’t be touched.

Things could always be worse.

And maybe one day, if this ever comes to an end, they’ll be able to try it for real. 

**Author's Note:**

> Tap code translations:
> 
>  **Al:**  
>  I. _(Tap, tap.)_  
>  Am. _(Tap, dash. Dash, dash.)_  
>  Free. _(Tap, tap, dash, tap. Tap, dash, tap. Tap. Tap.)_
> 
> Love. _(Tap, dash, tap, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, tap, dash. Tap.)_  
>  You. _(Dash, tap, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, dash.)_
> 
>  **Sam:**  
>  I. _(Tap, tap.)_  
>  Know. _(Dash, tap, dash. Dash, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, dash, dash.)_  
>  Love. _(Tap, dash, tap, tap. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, tap, dash. Tap.)_  
>  You. _(Dash, tap, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash. Tap, tap, dash.)_  
>  Too. _(Dash. Dash, dash, dash. Dash, dash, dash.)_
> 
> You can find me on tumblr @augustheart.


End file.
